Overview

It is often stated by open source adherents that there are justifiable business reasons for contributing to open
source, independent of the obligations of the license or a philosophical sense to return value for value received.

Some of these reasons are:

reduced maintenance cost over time

code improvements for contributed code

This page describes some factor affecting the return on investment that an individual or company might expect
from open source. It tries to define factors which affect the long-term costs and benefits of utilizing open
source software, and contributing to its development. It is intended that this include consideration of direct
costs and received value, as well as the role of network effects in increasing the value of shared code bases
over time.

Right now, this is just a loose collection of ideas for things that affect ROI. Maybe someday, I'll turn this
into a more formal paper, and try to collect metrics for some of the factors mentioned below. --TimBird 21:16, 31 May 2007 (EEST)

Big overview

Total return from open source = value of code that is relevant to your product, minus acquisition and integration cost, minus participation cost